CAPM Business Analysis Frameworks Practice Question
A business analyst is facilitating a requirements workshop for a new payment system. The workshop includes representatives from sales, finance, IT, and customer support. During the session, the sales team insists on supporting multiple currencies, while finance emphasizes strict audit trails. IT wants a microservices architecture, but customer support demands a simple user interface. The conversation becomes heated, and no decisions are made. The project sponsor wants a single recommendation that balances these needs. As the business analyst, what is the best approach to move forward?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use a prioritization matrix based on business goals, such as revenue impact and compliance, to rank requirements.
Using a prioritization matrix based on business goals (e.g., revenue impact, compliance) provides an objective framework to resolve conflicting stakeholder requirements. This approach aligns with business analysis best practices for managing trade-offs and ensuring decisions support overall business objectives. Option A delays resolution and may miss cross-departmental dependencies. Option C abdicates the BA's responsibility to facilitate decisions and may lead to arbitrary choices. Option D risks alienating other stakeholders and does not address the core conflict.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Schedule a follow-up meeting with each department separately to gather more details.
Why it's wrong here
Separate meetings defer the conflict rather than resolve it, producing four unintegrated wish lists instead of the single balanced recommendation the sponsor requested. Individual elicitation suits gathering confidential or detailed input, but here the competing needs must be negotiated jointly through prioritisation and trade-off analysis.
- ✓
Use a prioritization matrix based on business goals, such as revenue impact and compliance, to rank requirements.
Why this is correct
A prioritisation matrix scores each requirement against weighted business criteria such as revenue impact and compliance, producing an objective ranking that resolves the sales, finance, IT and support conflict and yields the single balanced recommendation the sponsor requested.
- ✗
Create a requirements document that includes all demands and let the project manager decide.
Why it's wrong here
Documenting every demand without analysis or prioritisation abdicates the business analyst's responsibility and hands the sponsor an unresolved conflict rather than the single balanced recommendation requested. Requirements documentation suits recording agreed, analysed needs; here the competing demands must first be evaluated and traded off.
- ✗
Propose a solution that addresses the most vocal stakeholder's needs first to build goodwill.
Why it's wrong here
Prioritising the loudest stakeholder biases requirements toward sales, ignoring finance's audit trails and support's usability, so the recommendation fails to balance needs. Building goodwill this way suits low-stakes relationship repair, but the sponsor explicitly requires an integrated, objectively prioritised solution.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CAPM practice question is part of Courseiva's free PMI certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CAPM exam.